Ali Banisadr's first major monograph delves into the Iranian painter's influences and practice. Preeminent Iranian-American artist Ali Banisadr's canvases depict a complex swirl of action and abstracted figuration across a stagelike picture plane. Varied histories inform these paintings, ranging from the artist's synesthesia, to Persian miniatures, to the multi-figure works of Brueghel and Bosch, and the gestural imaginations of Willem de Kooning and Max Ernst. Born in Tehran in 1976, Ali Bani...
This is the first book ever written about Jewish carpets. The history of these rugs goes back nearly 4,000 years and offers a unique and novel insight into Jewish culture through the centuries as well as into cross-cultural history. Background documentation ranges widely through descriptions taken from the Bible, Roman and Talmudic writings, the riches of the Genizah, the reports of medieval travellers, as well as archaeology and folklore. One hundred individual carpets woven in Israel, Iran, Tu...
In this important and timely publication, top international scholars present current research and developments about the art, archaeology, and history of the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Syria. Palmyra became tragic headline news in 2015, when it was overtaken by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which destroyed many of its monuments and artifacts. The essays in this book include new scholarship on Palmyra's origins and evolution as well as deve...
Inspired by timeless poems from around the world, Hassan Massoudy's calligraphy takes us on a visual journey through love in its many forms. Through his signature broad strokes and vibrant colours, this master calligrapher brings to life the words and wisdom of some of our greatest poets, from Ibn Zaydoun and Rumi to Kahlil Gibran, John Keats and Paul Eluard. Beautifully designed and illustrated throughout, Calligraphies of Love is the perfect gift for lovers, poets and dreamers.
A beautiful, fully-illustrated guide to Turkey's outstanding collections of icons, with descriptions and historical overview.
Geometric Patterns from Islamic Art and Architecture
by Robert Field
Until 2008 the Jaharis Lectionary was a hidden treasure: an illuminated Byzantine manuscript that was almost entirely unknown, even to scholars. Superbly preserved, it is arguably the most important Byzantine work to come to the Metropolitan Museum’s renowned collection since the 1917 gifts of J. Pierpont Morgan. It represents the apogee of Constantinopolitan craftsmanship around the year 1100. In this important study, John Lowden, a leading expert on Byzantine manuscripts, discusses his disc...
Light of the Sufis introduces the complex and multilayered topic of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, by concentrating on its expression in the visual arts and offers new insights into the integrative and fluid nature of the Sufi experience that has solicited strong reactions-both negative and positive-in Muslims and non-Muslims alike for several hundred years. Sufism became well established in the 9th to 10th century and reached its height in the 12th to 13th century. From its inception, Sufism r...
2020-2021 Two Year Planner (Pretty Perfect Planner, #1) (Dog Lovers Perfect Planner, #1)
by New Nomads Press
Once interred with mummified remains, nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt survive today in museums around the world, bringing viewers face-to-face with people who lived two thousand years ago. Until recently, few of these paintings had undergone in-depth study to determine by whom they were made and how. An international collaboration known as APPEAR (Ancient Panel Paintings: Examination, Analysis, and Research) was launched in 2013 to promote the study of these objects and to...
The Holy Land, so bitterly fought over by Israel and Palestine, was mainly desert and arid land, the only fertile plains being down by Galilee. The flowers that would have grown 2000 years ago are very different from those that grew in northern Europe in the late Middle Ages. This book is not a literal interpretation of the flowers described in the Bible, but an accompaniment, with manuscript illuminations. It is a celebration of both the language of the Bible and the beauty of medieval manuscri...
In the Wake of the Poetic (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East)
by Najat Rahman
Heralding a new period of creativity, In the Wake of the Poetic explores the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cultural expression in the last two decades. As it increasingly gains a significant presence on the international scene, much of Palestinian art owes a debt to Mahmoud Darwish, one of the finest contemporary poets, and to Palestinian writers of his generation. Rahman maps the immense influence of Darwish's poetry on a new generation of performance artists, visual artists, spoken-wo...
Persian Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Sussan Babaie and Marie Lukens Swietochowski
(This title was originally published in 1989/90.)
The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi'ism
Shi'i Islam has been the official religion of Iran from the Safavids (1501-1732) to the present day. The Shi'i world experience has provided a rich artistic tradition, encompassing painting, sculpture and the production of artefacts and performance, which has helped to embed Shi'i identity in Iran as part of its national narrative. In what areas of material culture has Iranian Shi'ism manifested itself through objects or buildings that are unique within the overall culture of Islam? To what exte...
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Ayyubid dynasty brought unprecedented architectural development to Aleppo, the most important city in medieval Syria. While early Islamic empires usually expressed their grandeur by founding new cities with vast extra-urban palaces, the Ayyubids asserted their power by "modernizing" existing towns. With its large, well-preserved citadel and a wide variety of pious institutions, Aleppo is the ideal subject for Yasser Tabbaa's study of the pan-Islamic t...